Sunday, August 25, 2013

NZCS is off to the Clouds

In every business, there comes a time for change. That time has come for New Zealand Computing Solutions (NZCS). Thus, we’re moving to the clouds.

Change is a necessity in order to meet the demands of the customers, and our business’ purpose is to help our clients be functional in their own businesses.

Furthermore, as the top IT provider in New Zealand, we believe in being on the bleeding edge, i.e., having the most advanced technology. And right now, the most advanced technology is the clouds.

We also believe in eating our own dog food. Therefore, not only are we sending our customers to the clouds; we’re there too.

What We Do in the Clouds
Here are some of the changes we’ve made since moving to the clouds:

The physical servers we had (and we had several!) are no longer in our office. They’ve moved to a data centre.

Our development team now operates via virtual computers and a terminal server (remote desktop server).

Because our line of business application, EzPSA, runs on Rack Space, our staff can gain access from anywhere; thus, allowing them to provide offsite support via an iPhone.

Our staff now uses Dropbox as well as Google Apps such as Google Drive. They store and share files on these services.

Our phone lines are all VOIP (Voice over IP) and we have ultra fast broadband and no landlines.

Life in the Clouds
We admit that moving to the clouds has been a slow process. We’ve even had a few issues along the way.

However, there’s a bright side to life in the clouds: it’s freed us from being in the office all the time. It’s also made deploying laptops and desktops to our staff a whole lot easier. This is because they don’t have a lot on them anymore.

Conclusion
Before you move your business to the clouds, you should do two things:

Evaluate whether this is beneficial to your business

If it is, carefully plan your move.

This is advised because the cloud is not right for every business. Nevertheless, nearly all businesses can still take advantage of using the cloud in some capacity.

So, even if you don’t use it entirely, don’t rule out partial use of the cloud. After all, technology is about moving forward. And in order for your business to stay afloat, you must do just that.